Does the same logic dictate we get a season with an ACE of 35?
Can you help me interepret the evidence you see in this chart for Global hurricane ACE?
To my geezer eyes, there’s a general trend down for Global ACE from about 1994…
I’m fascinated by this ability to see bogeymen, and particularly future bogeymen. Or am I looking at the wrong data?
From the text underneath the graphs (Use the Global tab if you want to see what I’m looking at):
"10 Things We Know About Accumulated Cyclone Energy
There is no evidence of a systematic increasing or decreasing trend in ACE for the years 1970-2012."
Understand I’m not so foolish as to think a single year’s remarkable variation in ACE somehow disproves AGW. I’m much more interested in how human psychology works to find patterns and believe things which confirm an a priori bias even when no such evidence exists. Lately it seems I cannot hear about a bad hurricane without simultaneously hearing about how it could be a harbinger of AGW. Data notwithstanding, apparently. Perhaps your memory of hurricane San Ciriaco is not as vivid as mine, my son. Sometimes it helps to be really old, and to have seen a lotta predictions crap out.
BTW what I do notice is that a few factors on what kind of damage a hurricane can cause are not included in that weather underground chart (the point should be here that as usual one aspect of the issue is selected that misses other factors)
While appreciate the effort you expended to provide “the data (.txt file)”, the chart itself seems to be lacking labels or other identifying marks. How does that specific chart change the fact that hadcrut would use the same temp readings for the most recent 15 years in their 60 and 600 year charts?
Why would I want to provide additional sources proving me wrong? (Have you given up trying?) And what do you mean “additional” sources?
The IPCC and agw camp seem to have a credibility problem convincing the public that global warming is currently occuring. The most recent 15 years seem to indicate that the global temp has plateaued. The IPCC and agw camp are busy trying to explain why the Earth’s actual temperature so cruelly betrayed the IPCC guesstimations.
I see that the discussion has been lively in my absence. I’ll try to be brief and respond to those points from Chief Pedant that particularly caught my eye at the moment…
Sure – right here: “Heck; with a little more AGW and CO2 fertilization, we might be able to get even more crops out of the northern latitudes and feed even more. We don’t know. (We aren’t interested much in exploring the upside of a warmer planet”
And spare me the “I didn’t use those exact words” defense. I think most of us recognize the “Richard Lindzen gambit” when we see it (“who’s to say what is the ideal temperature for the earth anyway?”, “warmer temperatures and increased CO2 can bring benefits”, etc.). As pointed out in a few links here, that isn’t what the science tells us – both from the perspective of physical climate system instabilities, and from the perspective of biological stresses.
Your entire argument at its core is that “we don’t actually know anything” … for example:
This is neither supportable or correct. Consider the following statement:
This missive, reflecting the ostensible child-like earnestness and alarmism of which I’ve been accused, didn’t come from me but from a joint statement signed by the US National Academy of Sciences, Royal Society of Canada, Academia Brasileira de Ciéncias (Brazil), Chinese Academy of Sciences, Académie des Sciences (France), Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina (Germany), Indian National Science Academy, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Italy), Science Council of Japan, Academia Mexicana de Ciencias (Mexico), Russian Academy of Sciences, Academy of Science of South Africa, and the Royal Society (United Kingdom).
These signatories effectively make up the principal national science bodies of the world. Their joint announcement, of which this is the full text, seems to run counter to your unqualified hunches.
I’m quite familiar with Emanuel’s work, thanks, and I’m not aware of engaging in “marketing”. Remember, the statement I was responding to was “Climate researchers predicted there would be more hurricanes in the future due to man-made CO2 global warming.” I’m not aware of that having ever been a widespread claim, from Emanuel or anyone else, and it isn’t now. The paper you cite says that some of the CMIP5 models differ from the CMIP3 ensemble in suggesting the possibility of increased hurricane frequency in addition to the fairly well established greater-energy theory, but with a great deal of uncertainty around that projection and indeed with some CMIP5 analyses contradicting it, at least for 21st century projections overall.
Indeed if you actually read the paper, the last sentence is “the differences between our results, those arrived at by applying the same technique to CMIP3 models, and the conclusions of other groups using different models and/or using different methods suggest that projections of the response of tropical cyclones to projected climate change will remain uncertain for some time to come.” And Emanuel himself has always been extraordinary conservative is translating even strong research results into public statements, let alone tentative preliminary indicators. On his own MIT website, he continues to stress PDI (a hurricane energy index developed by him) as the primary linkage between climate change and hurricane destructiveness.
Likewise, there is no reason to discard one of the main conclusions of the IPCC Special Report on Extreme Weather: “It is likely that the global frequency of tropical cyclones will either decrease or remain essentially unchanged. An increase in mean tropical cyclone maximum wind speed is likely, although increases may not occur in all tropical regions.”
It will no doubt be tempting for you – perhaps insurmountably tempting – to trot this out as an example of how little the science actually knows. I would stress again that there is a vast difference between predicting the general trend of the earth’s energy balance and the well-established evidence for the large-scale instabilities that rapid changes cause in both the climate system and the ecosystem, and the ability to predict the nature and timing of specific changes that are heavily influenced by chaotic factors. I will resist the temptation to provide obvious analogies, as I’m sure you can grasp the concept.
See, here’s the problem: Like most Alarmists you want to take umbrage with anything that challenges your assumptions. Including quoting me entirely out of context.
Here’s another quote from me you left out:
“I don’t deny that AGW may kill us all. Neither do I raise an alarm about it. It’s an interesting possibility that may turn out to be correct, and it’s a further possibility that some of the effects may be harmful. I do argue that the net effect is quite unknown, and I do argue that its as-yet-unknown net effect is nowhere near at the top of current environmental dangers to the health of this planet.”
I’ll let you and GIGObuster knock yourselves out convincing yourselves there’s good evidence hurricanes are worsening. Anything that fits the Alarmist mentality has to be right.
Where you are dead wrong is that there is any reasonable idea of what the net effect of this will all be. Concern? Sure.
But we just have a horrible track record of predicting outcomes, even when we are confident our models that set up the outcome are correct. Any confidence level about a particular putative outcome for AGW is badly overstated. If you think sea ice melting is the horrible outcome confirming the IPCC, you and I have very different ideas of what horrible outcomes are. I thought we were talking about some sort global catastrophe. And no reasonable person would deny the current trend is toward disappearance of the Arctic sea ice. What I am saying is that we have no idea what the in toto outcome of AGW will be, and our psychology is to emphasize the Doom potential.
The reason I assumed you were less familiar with Dr Emanuel’s work is this comment from you: “Until Emanuel’s landmark paper in 2005, no strong claims were being made about hurricane energies, either, but we now know that in many regions like the North Atlantic, we can likely expect fewer hurricanes due to distruptive factors like wind shear, but that when they do occur, higher sea surface temperatures will tend to create more energetic ones.” (underlining mine, for emphasis)
In fact, as I pointed out above, his work published last summer suggests hurricanes will be more frequent. It got press precisely because it fed a confirmation bias: Doom is on the horizon (read the Mother Jones article I linked to get a sense of what I’m talking about). Now that the 2013 season was so ridiculously feeble, it’s time to start parsing out the fine print at the end, apparently. Had the season been enormous, I suspect the headline of increased frequency would have seized the day.
I have no issue with Dr Emanuel’s prediction, particularly. I mean, he’s got a one third chance of being right. They’ll either be less frequent, or have the same frequency, or be more frequent. But whatever they are, it will not be much of anything but dumb luck if he’s right. So far I don’t see much evidence hurricanes are worse or more frequent by the ACE standard generally accepted by the hurricane community…of course if you just make the claim hurricanes will be hitting us hard Real Soon Now, we’re back to my point that we are lousy at predicting the future.
I wish Dr Emanuel the best. And good luck with his effort to get Germany off their dumbass anti-nuclear position, which has driven them to start burning up forests to prop up solarin the name of environmentalism. I guess when you’re in a panic over all these terrible consequences about to visit doom upon us, you can’t think straight anymore.
Bad enough to be crappy at predictions. Worse to take idiotic measures in the name of avoiding the uncertain predictions. Ah well…
I recommend a little less panic, even if takes the fun out of proselytizing.
One last thing: in the G8+5 paper you cite, can you help me parse out exactly what doom they think AGW is going to bring? I see melting sea ice, and rising (unquantified) sea levels. Is that about it?
A strawman tosser to the end. I’m on the record mentioning that a possible reduction on the number of hurricanes could be one of the few good things to come from a warming world, the point remains that many other issues coming thanks to the continuous increase on our emissions are still more likely to give humanity trouble if there is no concerted effort to deal with the issue.
What it is really reckless is to think that we should follow the advice of the ones that continue to tell us that we should bet on more risky outcomes. The best choice is still to reduce the risk, so, to reduce emissions is what the experts recommend.
The confirmation bias was really from you to think that doom regarding an increase in the number of the hurricanes was the order of the day, even the article reports that is not the case.
This item is just a confirmation that you still think that just using the spin of the popular press as being good; as I pointed before, but you ignored, the Mother Jones article reports that the issue of the hurricanes getting more numerous is not supported by most researchers. What you have there is just like the spin seen when the media claimed in the 70’s that an ice age was coming, controversy sells. And then contrarians spin it even more to give the impression that all researchers are just selling doom regarding an increase in the number of hurricanes, time will tell if he is correct on the increase on the number of hurricanes. And there warnings regarding the intensity of precipitation and surges that should not be ignored.
With all due respect, this is why I stay out of these tedious AGW debates for the most part. Each side is so desperate to convince the other, they pull out bits and pieces out of context and just end up yammering.
Please read that Mother Jones article again, slowly. The thrust of it is not the current consensus. The thrust of it is that hurricane Doom is even worse than we thought–and here’s why–from a respected hurricane expert. That new data (increased frequency prediction based on the CMIP modeling) is the news being reported.
Let me help you understand what the writer is saying. I hope this series of quotes will help you get the whole gist:
*"And suddenly, an MIT scientist—who’s arguably the world’s top expert on hurricanes—publishes a bombshell paper in a top scientific journal. His suggestion? That global warming might be making the most destructive storms on Earth even more dangerous.
Emanuel is back with a new paper challenging the consensus on hurricanes and global warming…
Following the explosive 2005 debate, scientists gradually settled on a new conclusion. Storms are likely to be stronger on average in the future and to dump more destructive rainfall, they agreed, but—in a bit of a reprieve—they’re also likely to be less numerous overall.
…to the untrained ear the current view sounds like a tradeoff of strength versus numbers, and thus kind of a wash. “I think that was a bad way for us to put it,” says Emanuel of the consensus view.
Emanuel no longer thinks that consensus is necessarily correct. In his new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he uses a procedure known as “downscaling”—combining together global climate models with a much higher resolution hurricane model—to show that hurricanes may be both more numerous and also more intense going forward.
And according to Emanuel, these newer models have a different treatment of so-called sulfate aerosol emissions, which come from the burning of coal and actually tend to reflect sunlight away from the planet and its oceans, producing a net cooling effect.
The newer models project a greater reduction in future aerosol pollution from countries like India and China. And as Emanuel explains, his “hunch” is that the disturbing hurricane response that his study found is a perverse result of this seemingly “good news” aspect of the models’ projections. In other words, if you clean up the air, you can actually worsen global warming and also, perhaps, hurricanes.
The debate over Emanuel’s new results has just begun—but already, the work has been challenged. The divergent findings, says hurricane expert Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, “indicate that care needs to be taken in being too explicit with climate predictions of changes in tropical cyclone frequency at this stage.” "*
All of this is exactly in line with what I am trying to get across here. We are lousy at predicting actual outcomes–what the actual in toto physical issues are that we have to deal with over the next decades. The Scientific consensus is that we are in a cycle of warming, and that this cycle is being heavily contributed to by anthropogenic causes. There is far less consensus on what the net result of that will be to mankind or to the earth’s environment, and the deeper one digs under the covers about specific outcomes (such as hurricane frequency and intensity) the more speculative and the less unanimous is that consensus.
For Alarmists, when potentially bad news comes out–hurricanes might get more horrible–it’s news precisely because it feeds our confirmation biases. When potentially good news comes out–CO2 fertilization might be beneficial–it’s quickly met with all the reasons it’s actually bad news. When bad things happen–hurricane Sandy–they are harbingers. When good things happen–2013 Atlantic hurricane season with an ACE of 35–they are normal variant outliers.
For Deniers, exactly the opposite happens. The 2013 hurricane season is proof Alarmists don’t know beans, and the past winter in North America is proof Scientists are idiots. It’s all just human nature, each side fighting for their Great Cause.
Next week if I have time I’ll open up a debate on why the AGW marketing message that we need to Change Now is toast. I think the movement is in real trouble, with the public pattern settling down to “OK; our increased CO2 might change the future. Please leave me alone for now.” I’m sure I’ll see you there, repairing my points.
That is nice, but I was and continue to talk about the current consensus, the point stands, you tried to make it sound like if the consensus was doom, that consensus will not do for the bias you have. So it has to be minimized by contrarians like you.
And you do it with a non-scientific article that does minimize the conclusions of Emmanuel himself. One mayor point I do make is that popular media is just about the last place to get information from, or I should say, the spin. As Science writer Peter Hadfield explained many times before, you need to check the source, more often you will find that the spin omits important information, and popular media gets a lot of the science wrong.
What it is clear to me is that you are also wrong in assuming that I’m also an alarmist.
The point I constantly make is that one has to look at what experts and the evidence and the climate scientists agree to so we can make better decisions, and it is clear also with this example that we can not rely on popular media.
Just concluding that there is only a message of doom is not the whole reality, of course there are some that press on alarmism, and I’m also on the record of shooting down alarmists like Lovelock. The point here is that you are even wrong regarding where I come from; before this subject and others I debunked many of the followers of the moon hoax, I got into that thanks to my experience in media and image formats and the science and historical evidence that told me how out of it the conspiracy theorists were.
Same with this issue, history allowed me to notice that virtually all contrarians insist on refusing to accept the evidence presented regarding the progress made with paleo climate (because it made their beautiful theory about how warm the medieval warming was inadequate, that warming was not as important as they assumed) was enough for me to conclude that contrarians follow the idea that climate scientists are into a conspiracy.
The points you are making here do rely on a conspiracy of sorts, but I think here this is mostly related to the incompetency of many in the popular press. The problem here is that you think that I follow the popular press when I look at this issue. Or that we should look at it to confirm a bias, as pointed that is not really important, what is important is to check what the researchers and experts agree nowadays, not what the popular press gets wrong.
My observation here is that the same can be said about the message of biologists regarding evolution, the acceptance of that message remains at worse levels than the acceptance of AGW, but what counts is that when important decisions are made regarding education and medical progress it is the experts that are consulted, not the popular media or creationists.
Mercifully, a relative economy of words will suffice here as the answer to that covers many other points.
The answer is “no”, and that question is a misinterpretation of the nature and purpose of the document I linked, which is not a “paper” but a policy statement and an urgent call to action with respect to specific actions that are needed to mitigate AGW. It specifically references the assessments of the IPCC, which itself is just a reflection of the current state of scientific knowledge, and those who are interested in the details about the impacts of climate change can find them in abundance in the IPCC Working Group II assessments (of which a new report will be issued next month as part of the Fifth Assessment series) and of course throughout the literature.
Let’s remember that this statement represents the consensus of the world’s major national science bodies, and is far from the only such policy statement. Similar statements have been issued before by the US National Academy of Sciences and such organizations as the International Energy Agency, the World Bank, the American Physical Society, the National Intelligence Council, and literally countless others. It is astounding to me that anyone could believe that there is any credible basis for contradicting this kind of scientific consensus based on such denialist canards as “science can be wrong” or, with all respect, an entirely specious armchair analysis of the psychology of human belief systems.
The MJ article is to me an all too typical example of bad journalism, and specifically of sensationalized journalism. If your point is that we are infested with bad reporting and irresponsible media, I agree with you completely, but I would point out that journalistic sensationalism doesn’t lead quite to the results you claim it does. Sure, it will tend to sensationalize negative predictions into a gloom & doom scenario, but bad journalism above all seeks to create headlines, and nothing creates headlines better than conflict and debate. So for every climate scientist announcing a potentially damaging finding in relation to climate change, the media is happy to trot out some lunatic to flamboyantly contradict him, which not only creates headlines but provides the illusion of “balance” and thrills their advertisers by not only drawing in a bigger audience but also by appealing to industrialists’ denialist proclivities. It is, indeed, the media and nothing else that has created the illusion of “debate” over key issues that are in reality pretty much settled science and rarely if ever appear in the legitimate scientific literature.
In that connection we return here to our man of the hour, Kerry Emanuel, who has written some notable pieces on the politics of climate change, one of which is a wonderful essay called “Phaeton’s Reins” that appeared in the Boston Review in January/February 2007. Google will still turn up various versions of it online and I highly recommend it. It’s about 16 or 17 pages long but this is one quote that is relevant here – and it’s a theme that I’ve emphasized many times – that the public has not been well served in this arena either by the media or by its politicians:
It is just a resource, not using it just demonstrates that you are not even aware that people can organize what was discussed before and agreed after many years of research.
I guess because you think that is impossible your only fallback is to attempt to kill the messenger, it does not matter that many diverse sources like conservative scientists, people that investigate pseudoscience for a living and many skeptic groups and individuals recommend Skeptical Science.
Sometimes it helps to be really old, and to have seen a lotta predictions crap out.